Data from: Social structure of the harem-forming promiscuous fruit bat, Cynopterus sphinx, is the harem truly important?

Bats are social animals and display a diverse variety of mating and social
systems, with most species exhibiting some form of polygyny. Their social
organization is fluid and individuals frequently switch partners and
roosting sites. While harem-like social organization is observed in
multiple tropical species, its importance is contested in many of them. In
this study, we investigated the role of harems in the social organization
of the old world fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx. Based on regular behavioural
observations over a period of 20 months and genetic data from
microsatellite markers, we observed that the social organization is
flexible, individuals regularly shift between roosts and the social
organization resembles a fission–fusion society. Behavioural and genetic
analyses suggest that the harems are not strict units of social structure,
and the colony does not show signatures of subdivision with harems as
behavioural units. We also observed that there was no correlation between
individuals with high association index and pairwise relatedness. Our
findings indicate that similar to the mating system, the social
organization of C. sphinx can also be categorized as a fission–fusion
society, and hence the term ‘harem’ is a misnomer. We conclude that the
social system of C. sphinx is flexible, with multi-male multi-female
organization, and individuals tend to be loyal to a given area rather than
a roost.